I have noticed google doing a bunch more monopoly stuff since they weren’t willing to pay the government not to be called a monopoly, I guess they aren’t afraid of being a
monopoly anymore since they have been declared a monopoly hay did you know google was legally ruled a monopoly?
Despite what Google wants you to think, organic search is not the only way to get traffic. Fuck em. Time to disallow Googlebot in robots.txt and noindex your content.
And also to explicitly feed garbage when the useragent is that of the googlebot. And while we are at it, do the same with a few other UAs too. You know which I mean.
Of course, that may not be feasible for everyone, but I do know that my visitors are not coming from google.
I don't know about federated, but there is SearXNG, which is FOSS. There are plenty of public instances or you can run your own instance.
If you are willing to pay money ($5-10 USD) then I recommend Kagi. In my opinion Kagi is worth the money, as it it provides much better results and has a lot more features. Like SearXNG, it is also ad-free.